Folie à Deux
by Ninjagrrl
Summary: Tsuzuki & Touda fic. The aftermath of the Kyoto events leave Tsuzuki afraid that he destroys everything he touches.


Folie à Deux

Author's Notes – I've written so much recently! There's this, another couple of oneshots and new chapters for GTC and Meltdown due soon, if anyone's following those. This was cannibalised from another fic that wasn't working out, and recycled as Touda-writing practise that turned into a oneshot. He's quite difficult to characterise- I tend not to portray him as being very fluffylicious since.. well, he isn't that nice. I assume the "RARR TOUDA ANGRY, TOUDA SMASH EMPEROR!" scene means that he was acting under orders then, but he acknowledges that he's as likely to destroy friends as enemies, doesn't seem to care about anyone except Tsuzuki, and is quite unapologetic about it. So usually I write him somewhere inbetween.

Disclaimer - I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended. Concrit welcome!

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Tsuzuki is beyond caring about anything real any more, but some small, childlike part of himself is glad that he will see Touda's flames at least once before he dies. This is the first and only time Tsuzuki has ever summoned him. All shikigami require great mental strength to control, and particularly one like Touda, whose fire will raze anything in its path. Tsuzuki had promised the others that he would only ever summon Touda as a last resort, and this is his final solution.

Through a rip in space and time, the first few black flames come dripping, spilling like liquid shadows that drain the light from the laboratory wherever they touch. Hellfire is nothing like Suzaku's flames. She bursts out of the air in a flurry of molten rain, crackling with righteous anger and all the passion and fury of the phoenix. Suzaku is both destruction and regeneration. As phoenix fire kills, life rises again from its ashes. Touda's fire is created only for annihilation.

Tsuzuki watches it rippling up the walls like sheets of black silk under water, and thinks vaguely of endtimes and apocalypses, of reckoning and judgement days and cities gone to smoking ruin. He sees now why the others warned him against calling Touda. Before the shikigami has even been fully summoned, there's threads of black fire racing up the walls with the quick whipsnap motion of striking cobras, until the room's entwined in thin lines of flame and acid-scar trenches of liquidified glass and metal. As Touda rises up into existence, a wave of superheated air hits him, and Tsuzuki doesn't flinch as the world around him explodes into chaos. Everything has gone very still here, at the turning point of the world.

A dark silhouette appears in the midst of the flames, makes a sharp gesture and the fire parts to leave a clear path between them.

Tsuzuki blinks slowly, a world gone to nothing but light and shadows slowly coming back into focus. It's a beautiful light show for one who can bear it, but even for a shinigami, it's painful to watch. If the heat didn't burn out mortal eyes, the flare from each fresh gout of fire would blind them milky and sightless.

The flames flicker on the black glassy visor, from the fire around them or Touda's own unsettling eyes. The shikigami understands. Hellfire might be the only thing that can burn away Tsuzuki's strange half-life forever, but even if it was possible, he couldn't have asked any of the others to destroy him. Serpents understand the fall from grace very well. Some mortals believe that God cursed them above every creation for their part in man's downfall.

There's no sympathy, no refusal, no attempt to talk Tsuzuki around. In his own way, perhaps Touda's loyalty is more absolute than any of the others. Morality, and the shikigami's own feelings are inconsequential. There is only loyalty, orders and consequences here. And Tsuzuki doesn't need to lie to Touda, or trick the shikigami into taking his life. Hellfire serpents are designed to destroy, and the concept of _murder_ or _suicide_ as mortal sins do not concern Touda. Tsuzuki only ever had to ask.

Then Touda disappears back into his fire, and leaves Tsuzuki kneeling alone in the heart of his pyre. There's just the dim shape of the shikigami's armoured coils around him, and Tsuzuki thinks vaguely about the _ouroboros_, the serpent that signals immortality. All beginnings and all ends come together here, he and Muraki at the centre of the fire. Out of the darkness they came, and into the darkness they return. Tsuzuki has never seen the damage that hellfire will cause, but he imagines one almost purifying blast reducing everything to fragile bone and clean, sifting ashes. Perhaps when the building is reduced to dust, the wind will scatter his mixed heritage back to its elements once more.

Tsuzuki has seen how mortals will fight their own death, but after living too long, it's the easiest thing he's ever done. It's easier than waking up to the echo of screams silenced a century ago, than letting lives stream through his fingers like sand, than wearing a smile that's most wide when everything's tearing apart inside. He lets his thoughts break up and drift away, each memory spiralling like moths into the madness around him, until there's nothing left but Tsuzuki to stand before the flames, the hellfire for a sinner.

Tsuzuki's eyes snap open as the darkness finally closes around him as gently as shadows and as inexorable as a closing trap, drawing in a sudden gasp of shockingly cool air that hits him like a spray of water. For a brief moment, everything is still as black as hellfire before his vision adjusts, and he can see the dim milky glow of white sheets and sterilised metal around him. It's the medical rooms, and the third night he's been here. Tsuzuki sits up slowly, because he sees something shimmering like oil rainbows on the edge of his peripheral vision. He isn't sure if it's maybe some residual damage from the fire, or if the flames still play on in his head.

Hisoka has fallen asleep in the chair next to him, sprawled sideways over the bed with his outstretched hand reaching out to Tsuzuki across the sheets, like a child creeping in with a nightmare. For a moment, the patterns of moonlight and shadows fall all wrong, and it isn't until his fingers touch unbroken skin and Hisoka's stirring awake, mumbling and confused, that Tsuzuki realises nothing's wrong. The skin up his forearms tingles with the memory of being wet with still-warm blood up to the wrists, and liking it.

Hisoka is offering to get one of the medics, or Watari if he prefers, but Tsuzuki shakes his head and lies back down. He will not sleep again, not when the next time he wakes up, that crazy-paving pattern might be drawn in blood and bone instead of moonlight and shadows. Tsuzuki lies awake, waiting until Hisoka's breathing slows before he opens his own eyes again. Every night, he begs them to leave him alone, to lock him somewhere he can't cause harm again. And every time, Hisoka's eyes blaze with the sudden, protective anger he sees in Suzaku, but underneath it the green is as raw as split wood still bleeding sap. He has hurt Hisoka too much to push him away now.

The dreams don't go away. Night after night, he refuses the sedatives that Watari prescribes, but the dreams begin to come when he's awake and that scares him more than anything. Everyone in the bureau has nightmares. They wouldn't be here if they didn't have regrets to tie them to this half-life. But it's when you're awake and dreaming that reality begins to slip away, and perhaps one day it won't be a dream at all.

Sometimes the dreams don't end in the fire. Sometimes he comes crawling out as something else altogether, something whose mind has cracked and the last of its humanity has been burned away forever. In those dreams, Muraki is always by his side, and there's a strange sense of rightness there, as if two mistakes can make one hybrid whole again. He walks with Muraki through ruins and black fires and the burned-paper twist shapes of things that once were human. At the end of their journey, there's always something awaiting them. There's the soft sound of chains shifting as it lifts its head to watch them dully. As they approach, there's a sudden sick flaring of raw red light spilling out from thin lines beginning to open all over Hisoka's skin, and new curse scars burst into appearance. At _Tsuzuki's_ presence, not Muraki's. Everything splits open like wet fireworks, and Hisoka's eyes are still terribly, painfully aware.

Tsuzuki wakes up standing in the bathroom of his house, and for a few seconds before the dream fades away altogether, he can see in the mirror that his own eyes are changing to the flat silver of a scalpel edge.

He leaves the house, blindly, thoughtlessly running anywhere, as far away as he can get. The night is cool, but he's burning with some feverish madness racing under his skin, waiting to be slaked in cooling blood. There's no-one and nothing here, just empty black streets oil-slick wet with rain, but everywhere the images superimpose themselves. Little things keep playing in his mind. Hisoka, when his shoulder was hacked to a ragged stump and one eye emptied out like a raw red pumpkin. The brittle, troubled look crossing Tatsumi's elegant features when they worked together, the sick realisation that he would tear his partner apart simply by _being_. Mariko's eyes, still hurting and human in the middle of all that wrongness, just before Suzaku tore her apart. The Judgement Bureau gone to rubble before shikigami wind and fire, only luck that no one was killed, and luck runs out.

The original route to the imaginary world was through the heart, and with his connections to the shikigami, Tsuzuki does not need Wakaba to pass through alone. The gatekeepers are familiar with him, and he passes by without questioning.

His shikigami usually sense when he arrives, but Tsuzuki tried to slip into their world as quietly as possible. He isn't ready for Suzaku's guilt, for Byakko's false cheerfulness or Rikugo's philosophising. He leaves Suzaku's territory and heads towards Tenkuu, uncertain. In the darkness, everything looks the same and he's even more acutely aware that this is not the world he knows. It's strange and dangerous there, the heated air thrumming lightly with warnings. It's heavy with incense, the light skittering sounds of some otherworld instrument and hushed voices speaking a language that sounds like springwater bubbling up from the ground. He turns around, lost, watching glass lanterns spill coloured carnival lights onto scarlet painted rooftops and dully gleaming dark woods, and the shadowed faces of things slipping by in the shadows.

Tsuzuki turns hesitantly into the unanswering night. "Touda?"

Touda separates himself from the shadows like smoke curling from fire. He's followed Tsuzuki as he always does, moving silently between the rooftops. It's only when Tsuzuki calls him or wanders into one of Tenkuu's traps that the shikigami ever shows himself.

Touda regards him impassively, and Tsuzuki pauses, suddenly uncertain. Usually he hugs his shiki whenever they meet, even if Touda pulls back, uncomfortable. But not now, not when the last time they met was in a maelstrom of fire, when Tsuzuki was still spattered with the guilty red sakura-petal patterns of Muraki's dying blood. He supposes they're even, now they've both seen the other in their most vulnerable moment.

"So you decided to live," Touda sounds neutral. No sympathy, no judgement, not a question. The shikigami know when Tsuzuki suffers. They feel his pain seeping through like a distant ache of their own, through whatever strange ties bind them, and they would know if he was gone, just as they might feel the loss of an amputated limb.

"For now," Tsuzuki says truthfully, and doesn't feel any need to lie any more. Touda doesn't ask if he's feeling any better, and he relaxes, no need to force out a lie when he's beginning to tear apart inside. There's a little truth in the lies. The pain _has_ died down. Perhaps humans aren't made to sustain that amount of guilt for long before it either breaks up or they implode. Now it's left him sore and bruised and used up to the core.

"I need to stay here for a while," Tsuzuki says, simply. "Away from the others. Somewhere I can't hurt anyone."

Touda doesn't question. Tsuzuki follows him into Tenkuu. The palace must be a fascinating place for SohRyu's children to grow up in. Over the centuries, the shikigami has seen a lot of history and none of it ever really leaves the walls. It's a labyrinth of long shifting hallways and staircases that rarely lead to the same place. New rooms are added as they're needed, then sealed behind spells or hidden entrances, or forgotten about altogether. Time and space have no meaning here, and it's a long and surreal journey. They pass through halls abandoned in the middle of some celebration, the walls still decorated with the red silk banners of an army eliminated centuries past, and music instruments abandoned mid-song. There's a bloodsplashed bedroom, stains faded to the nostalgic colour of dried rose petals, and he wonders what happened here and why it was sealed away. There's a stone-hewn cave flickering with firelight, made for some meeting back when humanity was still young, and for a moment the shadows shift and he thinks he sees dark, fur-clad shapes creeping around them. And they're still going on, through parts of Tenkuu that Tsuzuki has never seen before, deeper and deeper into the earth.

"Oh, Touda," he finally says, when he realises. He's came here before, although it was by another route.

"It's safe here," the shikigami says flatly, not turning around. "It was made to contain hellfire."

Tsuzuki walks past him, into the dungeons inside Tenkuu. Nothing's changed. The chains are still there, coiled harmlessly like a sleeping snake, links burst open and reaching out like beseeching hands. There's the same dim half-light, no source to even emit it this far under the earth and nothing for it to light except bare walls, one of them run to black, frozen glass from some last, desperate burst of fire before the spells woven around the dungeons shut it down forever. Touda is right. It's safe here. Nothing can live this far underground, and he can't cause any severe damage to Tenkuu either. It's a frightening place, but right now it seems almost safe.

It's cold. Touda asks if he needs anything, and when Tsuzuki nods, leaves silently and returns some minutes later with blankets. The shikigami still hasn't asked for an explanation, for why Tsuzuki chose to live or why he has came here.

"Would you stay with me?" he blurts out, not ready to be alone here with only his own red, violent dreams and the ghosts of Touda's nightmares soaking into the walls. Tsuzuki could not kill a shikigami so easily, and Touda can defend himself if anything happens.

Touda glances at Tsuzuki, impossible to tell his expression behind that visor. Indifferent, as he often seems, and difficult to remember how he had looked when Tsuzuki found him broken in the dungeons. Tsuzuki realises how insensitive his request is, too late, and if Touda refuses, he will not order him. But Touda nods.

Tsuzuki slides down against the wall, suddenly too tired with everything. The jealous chill of dungeon stone saps the heat from his skin, and he shifts to wrap a blanket around himself. He indicates for Touda to join him, and after a moment, the shikigami does. Tsuzuki gathers his scattered thoughts and Touda waits silently, save for the sounds of his breathing. It carries some of the dry sibilant hiss of gunmetal-scaled things which bask in fire and shape the ouroboros in the otherworld skies.

"I worry that I'll hurt them," Tsuzuki finally says, watching a fine tremor run through his hands. "I was so close-"

Maybe Touda will sympathise and more likely, he won't. Tsuzuki just needs to talk, and at least he knows the shiki will not share anything that happens between them. More tremors, and the sensory memory still tingles through his nervous system, of how it felt when the sudden shock of metal sheathed in flesh was transmitted up through the knife like a living part of himself. Muraki had spilled open, wet and red and suddenly nothing but another mortal dying by his hand. He could have lost himself there, and Tsuzuki wonders if Touda would remain loyal if he had. The others would not. SohRyu would rule him to be unstable and unworthy. Kijin and Rikugo's calm natures are not suited to bloodshed. Byakko can be irresponsible, but even he would see if something had gone terribly wrong with Tsuzuki. Perhaps Suzaku would be blinded by her devotion to him for a little while. She has killed innocents for his sake before. He remembers Mariko again, torn to human shreds and pulpy centipede parts.

"It would have been for the best if you destroyed me. But then, you probably will one day-"

Touda is a double-edged sword. Anyone who plays with hellfire will inevitably get burned.

"Maybe best for you too. I couldn't have been a very good master. You're meant to be a weapon, and I never summoned you before."

Because yes, maybe he had freed Touda and maybe all the other shikigami claimed it was far more than he deserved, but Tsuzuki had only changed one prison for another, stone and chains for a glass visor and a lifetime's servitude. The other shiki could choose to accept his challenge, and sometimes he wonders how much of a choice Touda had really had. Centuries imprisoned would be enough to drive anyone insane, and Tsuzuki hopes Touda has enough of the serpent in him to have hibernated through those long years.

Tsuzuki thinks about the way Mariko had looked at him. He could take disgust and hatred, he's had those all his life. It was the fear in her eyes that he couldn't bear. Touda must be as feared, in his own world. All of the highest twelve shikigami command a certain amount of respect, without destructive hellfire and whatever war crimes had seen Touda locked away. At least here no-one knows Tsuzuki's past and none of the shikigami care about his damning purple eyes. He glances up, letting his troubled thoughts scatter again. Touda could almost pass for human, save for the slit pupils and the two sharp eye teeth.

"Are you poisonous?" he asks, mildly curious. He's always been interested in the way shikigami retain some characteristics of their true forms. Tsuzuki might have unsettling, purple eyes, but Suzaku has the acute, pentachromatic vision of a bird, Byakko can see in near-total darkness and Touda can navigate by infra-red heat alone.

"No one has ever attempted to eat me and found out," Touda says, a little dryly. "I am venomous, however."

"Would it harm a shinigami?" He almost expects to see venom welling up, clear amber poison the colour of diluted honey and watered-down sunlight, but there's nothing there at all.

"I don't know," Touda says, after a pause. "The hellfire works first."

Tsuzuki half-wants to ask how quickly the fire would destroy shinigami. He knows that Kurikara's fire can be deadly, that even if a shinigami crawls out from the flames alive, the wounds will keep on poisoning them from the inside. But he doesn't ask, not when seconds saved the other shinigami from being swallowed up in black flames. He turns the subject over again, picking at it like a wound he can't let heal.

"I think I'm losing my mind."

"Shikigami do not serve the unworthy," was all Touda said, and it was enough.

"You would destroy me, Touda?"

There was no reply, but he knows the answer already, as well as he knows each of his shikigami. Touda has killed masters before. He might be faithful to Tsuzuki, but he's faithful to what Tsuzuki _was_, not whatever broken, insane ruin he may end up. Serpents are not sentimental.

"Good. That's good."

He relaxes slowly against Touda, his head resting on the shikigami's shoulder. It's comfortable, even if it's only a facade, resting against human skin instead of sleek armoured scales glowing with hellfire heat. And it's almost safe like this, to be with someone- _something- _that won't shudder at his touch. Touda isn't particularly comfortable with affection, but he doesn't draw away, and after a moment or two, he relaxes a little. Perhaps the warmth is too welcome for him to resist. Touda is a cold blooded creature, and the restraint device must make it difficult to maintain his own temperature in fragile human form.

Tsuzuki's attention drifts to the restraint device. It pains him a little to see it, a former Divine Commander kept on a permanent leash, and all he can do is hold his authority as lightly as he can until they can almost pretend there's nothing between them at all. Tsuzuki runs his fingers along the edge of the smoky black visor. Something stirs inside it, reflecting back firelight that rolls uneasily along the inside of the glass, and then fades back into opaque darkness. Tsuzuki knows that Touda has eyes like fire opals, full of shifting light that reminds him of the way blood curls up into a syringe. Eyes that are stranger than his own, but the difference is that Tsuzuki is a hybrid caught between two worlds, cursed blood tempered by humanity. He could not blame Touda for his nature.

He traces the edge of the restraint device to the temples, and then stops as Touda flinches, minutely. There's something there, like a thin bolt running underneath the visor and disappearing into the skin just besides the frontal lobes, the centre of free will.

"Does this-" he says, and then stops. Of course it does, and once again he's left feeling naïve. How else did he think glass and metal would restrain a shikigami's power? Touda doesn't answer, and it must be an uncomfortable subject. Tsuzuki imagines it to be a little like losing one of your senses. More than that, maybe, left with defenses gone like a declawed cat in a dangerous world. He lets the subject go, but there are other answers he came to find.

"Why did you follow my order?" Tsuzuki finally asks. Even if the others could have destroyed him, he doesn't believe they would. Some, like SohRyu, would consider his wishes foolish. And some, like Suzaku and Byakko, would rather destroy themselves before they could turn their power upon him.

"It was your order," Touda answers, flatly. "It's not my place to question them."

Touda has more to lose than any of the others, and Tsuzuki feels a stab of guilt. As if telling Touda to explain his wishes to SohRyu would be enough. Once Tsuzuki was gone, Touda would be returned to the dungeons until the end of time, or until some other shinigami came seeking power, even if it was a sword that would cut both ways. No, whatever Touda's intentions were, he had not acted in his own interests. But Tsuzuki accepts the explanation, and says nothing. There's not so very much that he can do for Touda now, except allow the shikigami his pride

"It's your life," Touda finally says. "I wouldn't deny you happiness, however you found it."

"That's what Tatsumi said," Tsuzuki considers it. What he really wants to know is whether Touda thought back to his own confinement, and whether death would have been welcome then. He doesn't say anything. Touda may act apathetic, may unapologetically stand by and watch others die and claim it is all nothing to him, but Tsuzuki knows his shikigami better. He's seen Touda when the shiki had nothing else to lose.

"Muraki still lives," he says drowsily, slowly slipping into sleep. It's cold comfort, a dungeon to hold him and an hellfire shikigami to stand guard, but it's enough.

"You should have let me kill him," Touda says. Tsuzuki couldn't do that, even though he'd given Muraki's death sentence the moment he told Touda to take his own life. He'd driven a knife right up to Muraki's heart, tip of it splitting the chambers to drain whatever poison lay there, and left him to die in the flames. But still, sometimes when he dreams, Muraki is there. He's burned to nothing but stringy blackened tendon and bone with hellfire, or his limbs are ripped to tattered pulpy shreds, or he's gone black and necrotic with Touda's venom. He could not give that order, and it doesn't matter how tainted the blood on his hands is.

"Don't. Don't kill Muraki, unless I tell you to." Tsuzuki pauses. "Did your fire injure him?"

"He'll live," Touda says, indifferently, without answering the question.

"You remind me of Hisoka, in a lot of ways," he told Touda, absently, after a moment or two of silence. He'd thought so since he'd met his new partner, bitter with a lifetime of resentment, outwardly unkind, spurning the small kindnesses Tsuzuki had offered. And yet, they had both came through for him in the end. Touda had agreed to take away Tsuzuki's pain in the only way he knew how, and then Hisoka had came into Touda's fire to rescue him again.

He remembers giving himself to Hisoka piece by piece over the months they've worked together, another fragment of the past shared every time they touched. Each memory that he'd buried coming uprooted, like something infected at his core. And each time, he expected Hisoka to leave where so many others had done, and he could not blame his partner if he did. And each time, Hisoka, eyes blazing with fierce, protective anger, told Tsuzuki that he didn't care.

"I don't want to lose myself," he says. "If that ever happens, promise that you'll kill me."

"It would be a pity," Touda says. "But I will honour your wishes."

"Why would it be a pity?" Tsuzuki asks, uncertain whether he wanted to know the answer.

There's another surge of reflected hellfire light underneath the visor as Touda looks at him sideways, light like sheets of fire rippling over oil. The shikigami's expression is unreadable.

"Because if that is your true nature, I would like to see what you become when you accept it." Touda tells him, and then there's nothing left between them but silence as they drift into uneasy, violent dreams.


End file.
